I am still on the old commenting style, with none of the JS crap, and /. was a pain on mobile till now. This is a fantastic effort guys. Really love the UI and as a product manager, impressed by the placement of ads. Really good.

Do you know why Intelligent design/God still hangs around? It is because we want to. No, not just the uneducated or unwilling, everyone.
Intelligent design means that we have been created by god, and for a purpose. Evolution means that we are here by an accident, we dont really have to do anything except make babies and have a good time (optional). There is no purpose following evolution.
There is a dissonance here. And that is why people have faith that there is god and he created them. We as a species are not good at handling dissonance.

You have just shown you do not understand anything about god. It is a construct used to explain a lot of phenomenon, predominantly social and personal. It works a lot of times (and explains coincidences pretty nicely :)) and thats why it still exists, even in the greatest minds.
Just because you know more about christianity and its bluffs(?) does not make you an atheist. True atheism is a philosophy, and is very well studied and documented. In fact, it is an integral part of some oriental religions and Hinduism too.
Religion has nothing to with facts, it is belief. As much as people want to know, people will also want to believe. And thats why, religion is never going to die. Check for yourself what you believe, and how much of it is as irrational as religion. I bet you will be surprised.

It is the student's responsibility to learn, and he can make use of whatever tools he has at his disposal to achieve that aim.
On the other hand , and in the real world, a majority (citation needed? I can give you anecdotal evidence from each of my 18 years of classroom education) of the students would be distracted by laptops. Forget laptops, I bite my hand regularly in classes just to keep awake and concentrate on what the soporific prof was talking about. Even a scribbling sound would distract me in his lectures, and I would end up dreaming from scratching to itching to that advert about itches to that model in the ad to that film about a struggling actor to latest movie to upcoming movies to next week plans to booze and sports. In an economics class. This actually happened.
I felt it was the professors reponsibility to stop me from dreaming by atleast pretending to not mumble. But I would be pissed if some other tech, which enables me to take notes, is banned.
All said and done, I wouldn't be too sad to see laptops banned.

Actually it is a cycle. De-centralised to centralised then centralised to de-centralised. A lot of concepts work this way. From political power (Local government to kingdom to local government) to computing (mainframe to data centre to cloud), we see this cycle a lot.
I actually hope that someone does a study of this phenomenon, and finds out an equilibrium which has advantages of de centralisation and centralisation. That would be something.

It's not over folks. Keep your Tor up and running.
BTW, I really hate it when media spins it to the advertisers. Wonder if an 'open' news site exists. One that gives me plain texts and actual information, not commentary along with facts.

What it means in Diplomatese is that they are going to set up a commiteee first, talk to each and every nation about their preferences, and then create a document, laying the bare minimum regulations that need to be imposed. Of course, some countries will not like this, and will not opt-in. A few will opt in, but the implementation will be so broken, that each country will set up its own regulation mechanism on the top of it. As these clash with the UN, the UN regulation mechanism will be completely broken.
The UN cannot tie its own shoe laces. This will only justify the creation of a government approved 'regulation' process, which is often referred to as cencorship.
The Internet was nice while it lasted.